Hybrid cloud computing systems are used to extend the capabilities of an organization's private data center that manages and executes workloads using computing resources such as virtual machines. A “public” cloud system serves multiple “tenants” and can expand the capabilities of such tenants by providing computing resources to the tenants on demand. For example, a private data center may migrate some virtual machines to the public cloud system for execution in order to free up computing resources for other work.
Although convenient, migration of virtual machines across systems in a hybrid cloud computing system may be slow. More specifically, virtual machines typically include large amounts of data, the vast majority of which is included in virtual machine disk (“VMDK”) files that represent virtual disk drives for the virtual machines. These files can include many gigabytes of data, meaning that transfer of such files may be a slow process and may also consume large amounts of bandwidth.